Everything in its Place

The first
thing that any school that starts using tablets learns is that the 16-, 32- or
even 64GB that they can hold is just not enough space for all the classroom
files that accumulate over the school year. The answer is to keep them from
filling up is to shuffle as much data as you can to a network drive, like WD’s
My Cloud family of external hard drives. They can make up for the lack of local storage
space on slates with models that can hold 2-, 3- or 4TB of everything from book
reports and lesson plans to math homework, class pictures and field trip videos.

Unlike most networked storage systems, My Cloud is easy to set up and takes a few minutes to configure, perfect for smaller schools that lack IT staff. The key to
its usefulness is that My Cloud starts by being a small and unobtrusive plug-in
box for stashing all sorts of stuff. Because it is connected to the local
network and onto the Internet, you can save stuff there and retrieve it in a
matter of seconds whether you’re at school or not. In addition to apps for
Android phones and tablets or iPhones and iPads, there’s software for PCs and
Macs as well, making it a clean sweep as far as compatibility goes. You can
even email a file link for someone to securely download and open.

Regardless of
its capacity, each My Cloud storage system has a dual-core processor and
Linux-based internal software. This allows it to work just as well with iPad
files and those from a Mac or PC and have an attractive and easy to figure out
dashboard from which you can check on the drive’s status and make changes. The
system gets online via gigabit Ethernet and there’s also a USB 3.0 connection
for adding more storage with a second drive.

A big step
forward for the My Cloud is that it can also tap items saved on online storage
services, such as Dropbox, Google Drive and SkyDrive. When files travel over
the Internet, they’re secure, thanks to 128-bit encryption. The best part of
all is that unlike others, the drive doesn’t have a noisy fan. The drives start
at $149 for 2TB of capacity and include a two-year warranty.

TrackBack URL for this entry:http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00e54faaf86b8833019affbb2fe4970b